Wallace and Gromit, Bob the Builder and Pingu are going in to battle as leading lights of Britain's animation industry prepare to campaign for government support for UK-based talent. The industry, creator of classics such as Bagpuss, Mr Benn and Thomas the Tank Engine, is seeing talent lured overseas by lucrative tax breaks. And they complain that work is being outsourced to studios in the Far East. Earlier this month it emerged that a film produced to showcase one-eyed monsters Wenlock and Mandeville, the mascots for the London 2012 Olympics, was produced in China.

Animators including Blue Zoo Productions, Chapman Entertainment, Nickelodeon UK, Wallace & Gromit creator Aardman, and HIT entertainment, home to Bob The Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine, have banded together as Animation UK, to try to revive the sector's fortunes. They plan to lobby the Treasury, as well as culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and culture minister Ed Vaizey, calling for similar tax breaks to those already available to the film industry.

I'm not sure that even a sizeable tax break would have brought the production back to the UK. Unfortunately wages are so low in the SE Asia that the English government would almost have to give the producer money back to make it competitive.

This gets back to a point I was making in another post about Dispecable Me being produced in France. The talent is very good and the cost is much lower.

How far are people willing to go to keep productions local? In the commercial world a lot of us are doing work at cost just to stay alive.